Providing situational awareness to mobile device clients (users) in the field has been a challenge. For example, the accuracy and reliability of location-based services provided by cellular providers is often inadequate for many field applications. Similarly, the delays and fees associated with messaging and location-based services from cellular providers can be burdensome to the client user. Many location-based services have a high latency between the time a sample is recorded and the display of that location information on another device, as there is a requirement to write location specific data to a permanent storage device before being disseminated to other mobile devices. Other factors contributing to the high latency and poor refresh rate of the location information may include inefficient use of available network bandwidth, and “dead air” periods which may be associated with a rigid synchronous request/response cycle. Such overhead can make a system undesirably costly and, furthermore, unnecessarily limit the number of field units available to a particular situational awareness scenario.
Therefore there remains a need in the art for a location-based service network providing accurate and reliable location information to a multitude of mobile clients (and non-mobile clients) in real time, thus providing a higher level of situational awareness to those clients.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems and methods with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.